Ticket for 45W or Bust

One of the biggest stories today will be the lower TDP in the BE-2350. As we've mentioned a few times, AMD's launch today introduces a couple of 45W CPUs destined for small form factors, HTPCs and corporate desktops. The CPU will appeal to those looking to save power as well as those looking for a piece of the silent PC pie.

While lower power consumption from the CPU is a start, it's only as effective as the sum of its fellow parts. To get the most energy efficiency out of your setup, you'll need to build your PC using an energy efficient PSU as well as an energy efficient motherboard. Basically, anyone looking to build a dual graphics gaming PC is not the intended market. However, as we've seen with with earlier Brisbane CPUs, the low power and lower heat could help an enthusiast in their overclocking endeavors.

Before moving on to the benchmarks, we measured the system power consumption using a Cooler Master RealPower power meter. The PC was built using a MSI 690G based board, 400GB Seagate Barracuda, ASUS 16X DVD drive, and 1GB of Corsair XMS2-667. The PC was powered on and left alone for 10 minutes and we recorded the following results:

System Power Consumption in Watts @ Idle

All three processors are not too far apart when idle, but we'll see if it's a different story once they are loaded up.

Test Setup

Operating System: Windows XP Professional (5.1, Build 2600) Service Pack 2 (2600.xpsp_sp2_rtm.040803-2158)
Processor: AMD AMD Athlon X2 BE-2350, MMX, 3DNow (2 CPUs), ~2.1GHz
Memory: 896MB RAM
DirectX Version: DirectX 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904)
Card name: ATI Radeon Xpress 1250
Driver Version: 6.14.0010.6660

Comparison CPUs: AMD AM2 5000+, AMD AM2 3600+

As per AMD's test recommendations, we paired the AMD Athlon X2 BE-2350 with the MSI K9AGM2-FIH. AMD's Cool 'n' Quiet was enabled and the MSI K9AGM2 was updated to BIOS v1.3 which recognizes the BE-2350. We compared the BE-2350 against two other energy efficient CPUs; the AM2 5000+ and 3600+ which are rated at 65W.

Test Software is as follows:

SiSoft Sandra XI - Our standard synthetic suite gets another upgrade. We like to use Sandra (System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) to collect some numbers as a base. The numbers collected are consistent and are easily comparable between systems during tests.

PiFast - A good indicator of CPU/Motherboard performance is PiFast version 4.2, by Xavier Gourdon. We used a computation of 10000000 digits of Pi, Chudnovsky method, 1024 K FFT, and no disk memory. Note that lower scores are better, and times are in seconds.

CDex Audio Conversion Wav to MP3 - CDex v170b2 was used to convert a 440.5MB Wav file to a 320kbs MP3. Times are in minutes:seconds, and lower is better.

DVD Shrink - We ripped the War of the Worlds bonus feature off the disk at 100% and compressed the file from the hard drive to 70%. Times are in minutes:seconds, and lower is better.

3DMark06 - We run the full suite of tests offered by 3DMark06 at 640x480 and collect the total 3DMark score and CPU score.

Doom 3 @ 640x480, HQ Settings - While higher resolutions tax the video card, lower resolutions rely on CPU and subsystem speed. Higher scores are better.

All benchmarks will be run a total of three times with the average scores being displayed. Any system tweaks and ram timings were configured to the best possible for each platform. In this case, there were some tweaks done for the memory for the K9AGM2, but nothing else was available for either board.

SiSoft Sandra XI CPU

SiSoft Sandra XI MMX

No real surprises here as the BE-2350 falls in the middle of the pack. It's a little closer to the Brisbane based 3600+ as the clock speeds are not as far apart.

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